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Box postpones its IPO again and is now eyeing 2015 to go public

Box is once again pushing off its IPO plans until next year amidst a shaky tech market that’s lost its luster after Alibaba’s big IPO in September, according to a Bloomberg News report that cites anonymous sources.

The cloud storage and file-sharing startup was supposedly aiming for an early September IPO after Labor Day, but when the market started to sour, it put its plans on hold, the report details. Box originally filed for an IPO in March, which led to reports saying that Box wanted to go public in June; when that didn’t pan out, it looked like September could be the big date, but now that’s obviously not the case.

In light of the news, a Box spokesperson wrote the following in an email to Gigaom: “Our plan continues to be to go public when it makes the most sense for Box and the market. As always, investing in our customers, technology, and future growth remains our top priority.”

The IPO delay isn’t all that surprising given that Box has done this in the past and used the same weak market excuse. Of course, a July funding round of $150 million from TPG Capital and the hedge fund Coatue Management should buy the company some time as it continues to wait for that perfect moment in the marketplace.

Around the same time in September that Box was supposedly aiming for an IPO, the company held its annual BoxWorks 2014 conference in which it detailed its new workflow management tool slated for next year. It’s safe to assume that Wall Street didn’t respond all too enthusiastically to that news. The company has its hands full as it appears to be sitting in between the big cloud providers that have their own set of work-collaboration tools and newer incumbents like [company]Slack[/company] that have generated a lot of interest.